Now, in no way, in the last five years or so, has my desire for a new R.E.M. album equalled my craving for a new album from the wayward troubadours known as Ween, which certainly seems ill-fated at this point. And, again, almost as soon as I have the thought, I’m fumigated from my “ideal” by the nagging reality that artists don’t really get PAID for doing this stuff, unless one of their songs lands on satellite radio, or a TV show or commercial. (I had this running joke that I’d plea to Ween, “I was planning on paying for your new album, I swear!”)
Anyway, I had what you might call a strange litmus test for the world’s need for new music from R.E.M., and no, suprisingly, none of it had, at least overtly, anything to do with the election. This is despite, of course, the band’s past dabblings in politics such as “Ignoreland” and “Bad Day”; in addition to all of Michael Stipe’s appearances at rallies, benefit concerts and such.
For the first time ever, anyway, the most important material on New Adventures in Hi-Fi and Up is starting to seem stale. It’s as if, for as fibrous as its structural muscles were, for how innovative the production was on both LP’s and how genuine and emotionally trenchant Michael Stipe’s lyrics were, the stuff has just kind of run out of steam. And I’m not sure if these are or ever were the two best albums by the band but they’re sure as He** the most personal — correspondent to the type of expression that can really get you through a lonely or low time, or get you through this literally “dark” time of year, if you prefer.
R.E.M. broke up in 2012, following the release of 2011’s Collapse into Now, which, as of right now, is the band’s last collection of new music. At the time, it seemed so “cute” and innocuous — the band announcing an end to their tenure together, which most people probably took to be temporary and to soon, within three years or so, give way to an ensuing outpour of new material.
Well, maybe this underlying, precociously subtle sense of strength and purpose, even in a breakup, is more typifying of what the band has been than a lot of people realize, and even harks to some of their strengths, regarding their prime material. Just to keep things in the late ’90s, “Sad Professor” is typically the song I name as my favorite by the band, and it’s without question the very epitome of strength, with its unabashed self-loathing in the lyrics, which sort of glide along the song’s structure and its brilliant a/b/ab chorus scheme.
This is a band a lot of people mock and attempt to pigeonhole. If my sister is any indication, anyway, and if the billboard charts are any indication, the release of a new R.E.M. record into the world was pretty much a religious occasion. Even for the part of the two late-’90s albums I mention above, they are each so distinct and phenomenologically different from each other [1], while still seeming to carry that common thread of spirit and songwriting purposefulness, that the results of a new release, in their cases, would seem to pay off right away, and obviate an achieved growth, during or before the recording, on the part of the band. And, really, if you’re talking about something that’s going to be the exact ideal of strength, that’s going to be like a pillar for you to lean on in your hard times, and when you really need music, why shouldn’t it be accompanied in style by light, easy-going gentleness? It’s all the less for pretense and all the more for trapping the haters eager to pigeonhole the band as inept or incomplete. R.E.M. is like that six-pack of beer or bottle of wine you bought earlier that you’re trying to hide from your coworker who’s next to you at the gas station. They’re your comfort. They’re the crystallized yield of what remains, in lasting rock and roll, after all the b.s. has been boiled out of the stew, and, as is proudly suggested by their Spotify photo where Michael Stipe is standing on that car, they probably had a lot more fun doing this stuff than you realize.
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[1] Actually, the two albums, even though I always lump them together, are so different in conceptual rudiments that one, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, was recorded pretty much entirely on the road, during sound checks, and the other, Up, was recorded at Peter Buck’s beach house in Hawaii, and without drummer Bill Berry, at that. Both albums peaked in the top five on the U.S. Billboard 200.
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